My own university, Cambridge, wants academic staff to undergo “race awareness” training. This advises you to “assume racism is everywhere”. Attendees are also reminded that “this is not a space for intellectualising the topic”. You might have thought “intellectualising” — ie thinking about — it is the kind of thing Cambridge academics should do. But don’t feel bad about getting that wrong; or at least, don’t feel bad about feeling bad: we are also told that these sessions aim at “working through” the feelings of shame and guilt that you might have on your journey in “developing an antiracist identity”.

A joke about education in Soviet Russia:
– My wife has been going to cooking school for three years.– She must really cook well by now!– No, they’ve only reached the part about the Twentieth Communist Party Congress so far…
Maybe it’s not so much funny as telling; but what it is telling of is the hijacking of a non-political activity — cookery, but it may as well be biology or history or maths — for a political end.
That end was not (or not only) to stuff your mind with state-approved facts (“facts”); it was to fashion a new man. Enthusiastic about “progressive” causes, responsive to peer pressure and ready to join in exerting it, and completely self-righteous, Homo Sovieticus would be the raw material of the Marxist New Jerusalem. As Stalin put it when toasting tame writers: “The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks.”
Communism has passed away. But the production of souls, or rather their engineering, survives in the capitalist Anglosphere. In our Higher Education sector it doesn’t just survive — it thrives, in the form of political indoctrination passed off as “training” or “mission statements”, specifically on the Thirty-nine Articles de nos jours: racism, unconscious bias, transphobia and the rest of it.
St Andrew’s, for instance, insists that students pass a “diversity” module in order to matriculate. Questions include: “Acknowledging your personal guilt is a useful starting point in overcoming unconscious bias. Do you agree or disagree?” The only permitted answer is “agree”. But what if you don’t feel, and don’t want to accept, personal guilt for anything? What if you think (like Nietzsche) that guilt itself is counterproductive? As one student aptly commented, “Such issues are never binary and the time would be better spent discussing the issue, rather than taking a test on it.”
My own university, Cambridge, wants academic staff to undergo “race awareness” training. This advises you to “assume racism is everywhere”. Attendees are also reminded that “this is not a space for intellectualising the topic”. You might have thought “intellectualising” — ie thinking about — it is the kind of thing Cambridge academics should do. But don’t feel bad about getting that wrong; or at least, don’t feel bad about feeling bad: we are also told that these sessions aim at “working through” the feelings of shame and guilt that you might have on your journey in “developing an antiracist identity”.
It isn’t just Cambridge and St Andrews. There is anti-racism or “unconscious bias” training being offered to, or more likely thrust upon, staff and/or students at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, KCL, Liverpool, Oxford Medical School, Sheffield, Solent, Sussex and doubtless hundreds of other universities and departments across the country.
It isn’t just training either. The very purpose of a university is being redefined. You might think they exist to conduct teaching and research. That would be naïve. Most universities now routinely call themselves anti-racist institutions, where this means: actively campaigning for a political end. For instance, Sussex says: “[a]s an institution we must actively play our part in dismantling the systems and structures that lead to racial inequality, disadvantage and under-representation”. Bristol expects all its members to “stand up” to racism “wherever it occurs”.

And on modern definitions, it may occur more often than its perpetrators or victims have ever noticed. For a thoroughly representative example: one Cambridge department tells students that expressions of racism include “beliefs, feelings, attitudes, utterances, assumptions and actions that end up reproducing and re-establishing a system that offers dominant groups opportunities to thrive while contributing towards the marginalisation of minority groups”. Notice that this definition is effectively suppressing beliefs (not just behaviour) on the vague and possibly intangible basis of whether they “reproduce a system”.

Now imagine being a clever, white 18-year old, not at all racist and not at all privileged either, away from home for the first time, in a lecture or class in (say) sociology, or politics, or philosophy, where a lecturer asserts, perhaps quite aggressively, that white people are inherently racist.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Friday, November 10, 2023
Children appear in the article as commodities, things to be made by a team of scientists. The parents will not conceive children in the traditional, haphazard, and deeply mysterious way. Rather they will be providers of genetic material from which children can be manufactured to order. Choice becomes key here, just as it is in purchasing a car or a toothbrush. And the feelings of the children manufactured this way are never addressed—how could they be? 

Last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal featured an article as fascinating as it was disturbing: “What If Men Could Make Their Own Egg Cells?” It discussed the work of Matt Krisiloff, CEO of Conception Biosciences. Krisiloff and his team are working on producing human embryos from genetic material that is not connected in origin to an egg or a sperm. Indeed, the article begins with a quotation from a Japanese biologist, Katsuhiko Hayashi, who believes that it will be possible to make human eggs from skin cells within a decade.
While the science is surely impressive, it raises all kinds of ethical questions. The article nods to the fact that developments in reproductive technology have transformed the notion of parenthood. Though it does not use the term, a contractual notion of parenthood as functional rather than natural seems to be emerging in the West. The recent (thankfully failed) bill in California that aimed to make affirmation of a child’s gender confusion a necessary parental virtue is a good, if egregious, example of this. Fail to affirm the correct political tastes and you are no longer considered a parent. Such cultural logic does not emerge in a vacuum or in a short span of time. The world of sperm and egg donation and surrogacy has attenuated the relationship between conception, pregnancy, and childbirth, fueling the kind of broader imaginative framework that makes the narrower logic of such a bill plausible. Gay adoptions have further contributed to this. While traditional adoption replaced the biological people (male and female) who should normally be there (as father and mother) with their equivalents, gay adoption effectively makes mothers and fathers fungible.
It is also interesting that children appear in the article as commodities, things to be made by a team of scientists. The parents will not conceive children in the traditional, haphazard, and deeply mysterious way. Rather they will be providers of genetic material from which children can be manufactured to order.
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The closest you came to referencing Scripture is that we need to love our neighbor. But condemning Christians for not loving their neighbor because they refuse a vaccine is a rather tenuous application. In Lev 13:46 the man with an infection isolates himself from the camp by going outside the camp for at least 7 days. We don’t see a command for everyone else to glove up. But we see a principle that the one who has a contagious infection needs to isolate himself from the healthy and warn those who approach (Lev 13:45).

Dear David,I recently read your article, “It’s Time to Stop Rationalizing and Enabling Evangelical Vaccine Rejection”, I am concerned with the following statement castigating fellow Christians:
“But it is increasingly clear that many of the remaining holdouts need their hearts to change before their minds will change. It’s their moral framework that’s broken, and when that framework is broken, reason and virtue have difficulty penetrating a hardened heart.”
David, our moral framework is the Word of God. I appreciated your quote from Martin Luther. But as venerable as he is, his words are not the inspired, infallible, inerrant, and authoritative Word of God. The closest you came to referencing Scripture is that we need to love our neighbor. But condemning Christians for not loving their neighbor because they refuse a vaccine is a rather tenuous application. In Lev 13:46 the man with an infection isolates himself from the camp by going outside the camp for at least 7 days. We don’t see a command for everyone else to glove up. But we see a principle that the one who has a contagious infection needs to isolate himself from the healthy and warn those who approach (Lev 13:45).
Moreover, David, we have the following commandment in our moral framework: “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor” (Ex 20:16). I think it’s time we stop assuming that men have the ability to read the hearts of millions of people we have never met. Your anecdotal evidence is simply that: a minor compilation of anecdotes. They are not evidence of millions of hard-hearted Christians living in disobedience to their calling in Christ. In Acts 1:24 we learn that only the Lord knows the hearts of men. And in Prov 21:2 we read, “Every man’s way is right in his own eyes, But the Lord weighs the hearts.”
And speaking of weighing the heart, the Westminster Confession of Faith declares that “God alone is Lord of the conscience, and has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are, in anything, contrary to His Word; or beside it, in matters of faith, or worship” (WCF 20.2). And the Westminster Divines based this statement on James 4:12 and Rom 14: 4. No person may bind another’s conscience, not even one with the best of intentions.
Many have tried to replace God’s Moral Law with a man-made morality. The Pharisees were one such group. The Monastics were another. Today we have the Red-Letter Christians and fundamentalist theologies that add and subtract from the Word of God. I would caution you against this course of action. God’s Word is perfect, restoring the soul.
Let us strive for peace and unity among the brethren, David. And let’s leave it to the Spirit of God to lead each Christian as they seek to follow their Lord faithfully.
Al Taglieri is a Ruling Elder (RE) in Providence Presbyterian Church (PCA) in York, Penn.